American Front

VIII

Dashing in spats and a double-breasted herringbone overcoat with a breast pocket slanted at the latest angle-or so he said-Herman Bruck came into the Socialist Party headquarters with a copy of the New York Times in one hand. He quickly hung his homburg on a tree and got out of the overcoat. It was icy outside, but very much the reverse with a couple of coal stoves and a steam radiator heating the office.

He went over to Flora Hamburger and set the newspaper on the desk in front of her. "Bully speech by Senator Debs," he said, pointing. The newsprint had smudged on the gray calfskin of his gloves.

Flora bent over it. "Let me see," she said. Debs had been the first Socialist elected to the Senate, coming out of Indiana when the Republicans broke up in disarray in the aftermath of the Second Mexican War. He'd been there ever since, and twice run unsuccessfully for president.

"'Our losses in a few brief months have exceeded all those in the War of Secession, till now our bloodiest conflict,'" Flora read aloud. " 'Soon they will exceed those in all our previous wars combined. And for what? For what, I ask, Mr. President? When we fought to keep the Confederate States from abandoning our Union, we fought for a principle: that the covenant of the United States, once made, was indissoluble. Here, on what great principle do we stand? That the European alliances with which we have entangled ourselves be honoured when even to be in them is to hold no honour? How splendid! How noble! What a fine principle for which to crucify mankind on a cross of blood and iron!'" She looked up in admiration. Several people who'd been listening to her broke into applause. "That is strong stuff," she said.

Bruck nodded, as proud as if he'd made the speech himself. "When Debs crosses swords with TR, sparks always fly."

Flora nodded. She read on down the column to the reply by Senator Lodge, who often spoke as Roosevelt 's surrogate in the Senate. Halfway through the summary of his remarks, she winced and softly quoted one sentence: "'The distinguished gentleman's remarks on the power of principle would seem more forceful had he not, in this very chamber, recently voted to support and finance the war he now so eloquently professes to despise.'" Her chin went up in defiance. "I knew that was a mistake, and I said so at the time."

"So you did," Bruck admitted. He saw the smudges on his gloves and took them off. His hands were winter pale. He spread them. "But what could we do? If we'd voted against the credits, we wouldn't have had five Socialists left in Congress after the November elections. As things are, we picked up half a dozen seats."

"What good does it do us to pick them up if we don't act like Socialists once we have them?" Flora said.

A secretary, an Italian woman named Maria Tresca, who, along with her sister Angelina, was one of the few gentiles in the Tenth Ward office, quoted from the New Testament: "'What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?'"

It was not language commonly heard in the Socialist Party office, but no less effective for that. Herman Bruck spread his hands again. "We've been talking about that ever since the Party decided to run for office and accept seats if we won. Does working within the government advance the cause of the proletariat or delay the revolution?"

The argument that spawned kept the office lively the rest of the day. While Bruck was putting on his hat and overcoat to leave for the evening, he asked Flora, "Would you like to go to the moving pictures with me? The Orpheum is showing the new play with Sarah Bernhardt in it."

"I can't, Herman," she answered, also buttoning her coat. "We're having cousins over for supper, and I promised my mother I wouldn't be late."

Herman Bruck made a sour face. Maybe he suspected the cousins were fictitious, as in fact they were. That, though, wasn't the sort of thing it was politic to say. "Another time, maybe," he mumbled, and hurried out the door.

Angelina Tresca sent Flora an amused look. She returned one of resolute innocence. The less you admitted to anyone, the less you had to worry about getting to the wrong ears. Flora waited a few moments so she wasn't likely to run into Bruck on the street, then went downstairs and walked home to her flat.

Cooking odors filled the hallway as she came up to her door. When she opened it, more came out. Sweet-and-sour stuffed cabbage tonight, she thought. Along with that savory scent came smoke from her father's pipe. It was harsher than it had been. He'd smoked Mail Pouch for years, but the Virginia and Kentucky tobaccos that went into the blend weren't available any more. Now he fed the pipe with something called Corn Cake, which smelled, as far as Flora was concerned, like burning corn husks. She kept quiet about that, not wanting to hurt his feelings.

Esther was in the kitchen, helping their mother. David and Isaac bent over a chess board at the table from which they would soon be evicted so everyone could eat supper. Flora glanced at the game. Isaac was a couple of pawns up, which was unusual; his brother beat him more often than not. The two mental warriors said hello without looking up from their battlefield.

"And how are things with you today?" Benjamin Hamburger asked.

"All right," Flora answered. "I'm tired." The moment the words were out of her mouth, she felt ashamed of them. Sophie was the one who had the right to complain about being tired: she worked longer hours at a harder job for less pay than her younger sister. Especially since the start of the useless, stupid war, Sophie had been dragging herself home exhausted every night.

As if thinking about her were enough to bring her home, Sophie came in just then, worn out as usual. She sank down onto the divan couch with a soft sigh and a posture so limp, it said she didn't want to have to get up again for anything in the world.

Esther stuck her head out of the kitchen and said, "Oh, good, that was you. I thought I heard the door. Ready in a minute." Sophie nodded wearily. She'd even been too tired to eat lately, which alarmed her mother. Esther's eyes flicked to her brothers. Pointedly, she repeated, "Ready in a minute." When that didn't shift them, she started setting the table. They had to move the chess set in a hurry to keep from having a plate land on top of it.

Supper almost made Flora wish she'd gone out with Herman Bruck. Her family didn't really want to hear about Socialist Party doings, not even her father. All any of them seemed to care about was ways to rise into the bourgeoisie, not how to aid and radicalize the vast masses of the proletariat. She sadly shook her head. Her own flesh and blood, class enemies. They didn't even try to understand the goals toward which she worked.

After supper, she and Esther washed and dried dishes. Esther wanted to talk about how the war was going. Flora didn't. That it was going at all was bitter as wormwood to her.

As soon as she'd put the last fork in its drawer, she got her coat and went out onto the fire escape. Her mother's voice pursued her: "We're not good enough for you?" But that wasn't it, even if her family thought it was. It was just that she didn't fit in among them, and the harder they tried to drive her back into what had been her place, the less it suited her.

It was chilly out there, but not intolerable. The nip of January air on her cheeks made her feel as if she were in a sleigh gliding down some quiet country road, not in the middle of the most crowded part of the biggest city in the United States, though she had to ignore the racket from her building and all the others to make the illusion complete.

A couple of minutes later, Sophie stepped out to join her. "Fresh air," her older sister said gratefully. "It's so stuffy in there."

Flora sent her a sympathetic look. "And you were cooped up in front of your sewing machine all day before that," she said. "No wonder you want to get all the air you can." She wouldn't have called New York City 's air, full of smoke and soot and fumes, fresh, but if her sister wanted to, she wouldn't argue, either.

Sophie stepped down to the edge of the landing and looked over the iron rail. It was dark down there, with nothing worth mentioning to see. Not really to Flora- not really to anyone- Sophie said, "I should throw myself off."

Alarmed, Flora hurried over to her and put an arm around her shoulder, dragging her away from the rail. "What's wrong?" she demanded. "Is it something at work? I know they've been exploiting you without mercy, giving you much too much to try to do. The way you come home every night-"

Sophie shook her head. "It's nothing to do with work," she said, "and they aren't working me any harder than they were before. 'Exploiting'!" She laughed softly, though not in a way that said she thought anything was truly funny. "It's not anything- political."

"Then what is it?" Flora asked. "People don't talk about jumping off a building for nothing, you know."

Her sister's shiver had nothing to do with cold, no more than her laugh had had anything to do with mirth. "What is it, Flora? Do you really want to know?"

"Of course I do," Flora answered, indignant now. "I'm your sister. That counts for more than politics, even if we don't agree all the time."

"Yes, but it was politics you thought of first." Sophie sighed. "I suppose I may as well tell you. I have to tell someone-and if I don't, it'll be plain enough before long, anyway."

"What are you talking about?" Flora said. "Just come out and say it, if you're going to."

"All right, then." But Sophie needed to gather herself before she brought the words out, all in one low-voiced rush: "Flora, I'm going to have a baby."

Her sister stared. She felt as if she'd walked in front of a train without seeing or hearing it coming. "How did it happen?" she whispered.

Dimly lit by the lamps from the front room, Sophie's face twisted. "How did it happen? There's only one way I know of. Yossel was going into the Army, and I didn't know when I'd see him again or if I'd see him again, and I wanted to give him something special before he left. And so I… and so we-" She didn't go on, and then, after a moment, she did: "I gave him something special, didn't I?" All at once, without warning, she started to cry.

"Does mother know you're- expecting?" Flora asked. She put her arm around her sister, who clung to her like a survivor from a torpedoed liner.

Sophie shook her head violently against Flora's shoulder. "I couldn't tell her," she exclaimed. "I told you because-" She gulped and stopped.

Flora didn't have any trouble figuring out what her sister hadn't said. Be cause you're the radical one, the one who believes in socialism and free love- something like that, anyhow. Flora had had men approach her on that basis, some of them men in the Socialist Party. But being free to love didn't mean you had to, and didn't mean loving was free from consequences, either.

Well, Sophie surely knew that now, even if she hadn't thought it through before. And Sophie wasn't some man trying to entice her into something sordid; she was her sister. "You're going to have to tell her sooner or later," Flora said gently, at which Sophie cried harder. Flora found another question: "Does Yossel know?"

Sophie shook her head again. "Every time I write him, I mean to tell him, but I just- can't."

"He's going to be your husband," Flora said. If he lives — she fought that thought down. "That makes it a little better. If he weren't in the Army, I'm sure he'd marry you right now." Sophie nodded. But if Yossel hadn't been going into the Army, Sophie probably wouldn't have given herself to him till they were married, in which case they wouldn't have had this problem.

"What am I going to do?" Sophie wailed- but softly, not wanting anyone inside to hear her.

The obvious answer was, You're going to have this baby. What sprang from that- Flora thought. At last, as if she'd just come up with a good campaign plank for a Congressional candidate, she clapped her hands together, also softly. "We won't tell mother," she said. "Mother is too perfectly conventional for words. All she'll do is throw a fit, and we don't need that, not now."

Sophie nodded again, looking at her with a mixture of hope and dread. "We can't keep from telling her forever, though," she warned. Of itself, one hand went to her belly. "Pretty soon, she'll know regardless of what we say."

"I wasn't finished," Flora said. "She has to know before she finds out that way. No, we won't tell her. We'll tell Papa. He won't get excited, the way Mother would; he has some common sense. And then, after he and we figure out what to say, he can tell Mother for us. He can be a-what's the word I want? — a buffer, that's it."

"I don't know." Again, Sophie's shiver had nothing to do with the cold.

"It has to be done. It will be better afterwards," Flora insisted, as if to someone with a toothache whom she was trying to get to go to the dentist.

Dread drove hope from her sister's face once more. "It won't be better," Sophie said quietly. "It will never be better, not any more."

Flora feared she was right. Even so, she opened the window that gave access to the fire escape and said, "Papa, can you come out here for a moment, please?"

Benjamin Hamburger had been standing over the kitchen table, kibitzing that game of chess-or maybe a new one by now-between David and Isaac. A puff of smoke rose from his pipe when he exhaled in surprise. "All the plots hatched out there, and this is the first time I've been invited," he remarked as he walked over and stepped out onto the landing.

That mild irony encouraged Flora. She closed the window. Isaac, David, Esther, and her mother all peered out toward the fire escape. They were used to her going out there. They were used to Sophie's going out there every so often. But when the two of them invited their father out, that was new, so it had to be suspect. Flora hadn't thought of that. Keeping the secret wouldn't be easy.

But, having started, she couldn't very well draw back. Her father was looking from her to Sophie and back again. If he wasn't the picture of curiosity, he'd do till a better one came along. Flora hoped Sophie would say what needed saying. When she didn't, Flora sighed and said, "Papa, we have to tell you something." Then she stopped. It wasn't easy, not when you got down to it.

Her father looked back and forth again. "What you have to tell me, it isn't good news," he said after a moment.

Flora nodded. That was true. While she was trying to find the best way to break the news, Sophie blurted, "Oh, Papa, I'm going to have a baby!" and burst into tears all over again.

Flora waited for the sky to fall. Sophie looked as if she wanted to sink through the iron floor. Their father stood quiet for a moment. Then, slowly, he said, "I wondered. There's a look women have in that condition, and you have it. And you're tired all the time, the way your mother was when she carried you. So yes, I wondered." He sighed. "I hoped not, but-"

"Will you tell Mother?" Flora asked, breathing more easily on finding his reaction was what she'd hoped it would be.

"She already knows, or wonders, too," her father said, which made Flora and Sophie both stare. He coughed a couple of times before he went on, "Remember, Sophie, she does your laundry, and-" He stopped, most abruptly, and coughed some more. After a moment, Flora understood why. Her face heated. Of all the things her father had never expected to do, discussing intimate bodily functions with his daughters had to rank high on the list.

Again, though, without some other intimate bodily functions, the discussion would not have arisen. And if their mother had known, or at least suspected, and kept quiet about it, that said there was more to her than Flora had suspected.

"What am I going to do?" Sophie wailed. "What are we going to do?"

Benjamin Hamburger stood silent again. "The best we can," he answered. "I don't know what else to say to you right now. The best we can." Flora had been worried a few minutes before, but now she began to hope that best might be good enough.

Abner Dowling escaped First Army headquarters with the air of a man leaving the scene of a crime. That was how he felt. Providence, Kentucky, was less than ten miles away from the front lines; the pounding of U.S. guns- and answering fire from Confederate artillerywas a never-ending rumble from the east, irksome like a low-grade headache.

Dowling pulled his cap lower over his face so the brim would keep the rain and occasional spatters of snow out of his eyes. General Custer liked being up as close to the front as he could get. In the stables, the grooms kept his saddle ready to be slapped onto his horse at a moment's notice, so he could lead the charge that would tear the Rebel position wide open.

"He doesn't understand," Dowling muttered, half to himself, half to the God who had so far paid remarkably little attention to any of his petitions. The major went on, still half prayerfully, "Even a blind man should be able to see that slamming forward in the middle of winter isn't going to get you anywhere."

One of the things serving under Custer had taught him was the difference between should be able to and can. The general kept feeding men and shells into the fight. Every furlong of bloody advance was hailed as the beginning of a breakthrough, every time the Confederates held seen as their last gasp.

"They've had more gasps than a brothel," Dowling said. His belly shook as he laughed at his own wit. Custer didn't laugh at anything. No, that wasn't true. When he heard about a squad of Rebs machine-gunned as they foolishly broke cover, he'd chortled till his upper plate fell out of his mouth.

A train chugged into Providence out of the west: another reason the little town was currently First Army headquarters was that the railroad tracks came under Confederate artillery fire when you got a little closer to the front line. Doors opened. Soldiers in green-gray, their uniforms clean and neat, their faces open and naive, spilled out of the cars and formed up into columns under the profane instructions of their non-coms.

Mud spattered their boots and puttees and breeches. The main streets of Providence had been paved with bricks, but the Confederates had fought for the town before finally retreating from it; the U.S. bombardment and, later, Confederate shellfire from the east had torn great gaps in the paving. The soldiers stared down anxiously at the dirt they were picking up, as if expecting the corporals and sergeants to start screaming about that.

Unblooded troops, Dowling thought with a sigh. They conscientiously marched in step as they tramped toward the front. They wouldn't worry about dirt there, not even a little bit. They'd be blooded, and bloodied, all too soon. "Meat for the meat grinder," Custer's adjutant said sadly.

Another engine got up steam and moved slowly along a side track till it switched onto the one down which the troop train had come. Then it backed up and coupled to the rear of that train. Meanwhile, as soon as the troops the train had disgorged marched off toward the front, other soldiers began refilling the long chain of cars.

They were meat on which the grinder had already done its work. Some of them, the ones with arms in slings or with bandages on their faces, climbed aboard under their own power, and some of those seemed pretty cheerful. Why not? They'd been wounded, yes, but they were probably going to get better, and they were going back to hospitals well away from the front. Nobody would be shooting at them, not for a while.

But after the ambulatory patients came the great many who had to be carried onto the train in litters. Some of them moaned as their bearers moved them. Some didn't, but lay very still. None of themnone of the walking wounded, either- wore fresh uniforms. Theirs were tattered and dirty, and their faces, even those of the men who seemed chipper, were a study in contrast to the way the raw troops looked. They'd seen the elephant, and he'd stepped on them.

Dowling wished Custer would come and take a look at what soldiers who had been through the grinder were like. But that didn't interest the general. He saw the glory he'd win with victory, not the price he was paying for advances that looked not the least bit victorious to anyone but him.

Down the street about a block and a half from First Army headquarters stood a nondescript brick building that hadn't been too badly shelled. Providence was supposed to be a dry town, but if you needed a drink you could find one. Dowling needed one now.

The Negro behind the bar poured whiskey over ice and pushed the glass across to him. "Here y'are, suh," he said.

"Thanks, uh-what's your name, anyhow? Haven't seen you here before."

"No, suh. I'm new hereabouts. Name's Aurelius, suh."

"You could do worse. You're named after a great man," Dowling said. By the bartender's smile, polite but meaningless, he didn't know anything about Marcus Aurelius. Dowling gulped down the whiskey and shoved the glass back for a refill. He didn't know why he'd expected a Southern Negro to know anything about the Roman Empire; from everything he'd seen, the Rebs did everything they could to keep their Negroes ignorant. He asked, "How do you like it in the United States?"

The bartender gave him a hooded look, of the sort he was used to getting from soldiers who'd been caught with dirty rifles. "Don't seem too bad so far, suh," the fellow answered. "Ain't easy nowheres, though, you don't mind me sayin' so."

And that was probably- no, certainly- nothing but the truth. Dowling thanked his rather deaf God he'd been born with a nice, pink skin. Niggers had it tough, USA, CSA, any old place. "Maybe you should go to Haiti," he remarked. "That's nigger heaven if ever there was one."

"No, suh." The bartender sounded very sure of himself. "Only difference 'tween Haiti and anywhere else is, in Haiti it's black folks doin' it to black folks, 'stead o' whites like it is here."

"You may be right," Dowling said, and sipped his drink. What he knew about Haiti was what a soldier of the United States needed to know: that the Confederates hated and despised the place because the Negroes there, no matter what they did to one another, were free and independent, and that Teddy Roosevelt had reaffirmed- loudly reaffirmed- President Reed's pledge to protect that independence.

One of the things he didn't know was how TR would go about making good on that pledge if the Confederates invaded Haiti. With Confederate Cuba so close by, with the long stretch of Southern coastline past which the U.S. Navy would have to steam, it wouldn't be easy. Or had TR intended to invade the CSA if the Rebs attacked Haiti? He shrugged. Trying to read Teddy's mind was always risky. Anyway, the USA had invaded the CSA without a Confederate attack on Haiti.

As he raised the whiskey glass to his lips, the rumble of artillery fire outside got louder. Dowling's head came up like a hunting dog's at a scent. The new roar of the big guns wasn't coming from the east, but from the south.

He slammed the glass down onto the bar. Whiskey sloshed over the side. He slammed down a couple of coins to pay for his drinks, and then, as an afterthought, an extra dime as well. "Here, buy yourself a drink," he told Aurelius. "It's the one I would have had in a minute." He rushed out of the bar and back toward First Army headquarters. The Rebel counterattack, the one between Hopkinsville and Cadiz — and the one Custer had insisted all along was impossible-had finally started. Dowling wondered how far the U.S. forces would have to retreat, and how fast.

A lieutenant clad in butternut spun on his heel and stomped away from the field telephone, muttering unsweet nothings under his breath. That meant it was Jake Featherston's turn to confront the marvel of the electrified age. To the corporal in charge of the care and feeding of the mechanical beast, he said, "Put me through to the main artillery dump, back toward Red Lion."

"I'll give it a shot," the corporal said, showing less than perfect faith in the gadget with which he'd been entrusted. He turned the crank and shouted into the mouthpiece: "Hello, Central?" When nobody shouted back at him, he muttered something that made what the lieutenant had said sound like an endearment. He cranked again. "Hello, Central, goddammit!"

Waiting for the connection-waiting to see if the corporal could make the connection- Featherston wished he'd sent a runner back to Red Lion. It was only a few miles southwest of Martinsville; the runner wouldn't have needed more than two hours- three at the outside- to make it there and back again.

But Captain Stuart was hell-bent for leather about using the very latest thing. Sometimes, Featherston admitted to himself, that was because the very latest thing was better than what had gone before. His battery of French-inspired three-inch guns certainly fell into that class. But sometimes the very latest thing was just newfangled confusion replacing old-fashioned stupidity- or, worse, replacing something that worked well even if it had been around for a long time.

"Hello, Central!" the corporal screamed. Featherston was about to give it up as a bad job and walk off- he could tell the captain he'd tried to use the phone, but it hadn't wanted to work- when the operator said, in reverent tones, "I'll be a son of a bitch." He turned to Jake. "Who'd you say you wanted to talk to again? Been so long, I plumb forgot."

"The main artillery dump," Jake answered, and the corporal relayed his words to the central switchboard. Now, if the wire between there and the ammunition dump wasn't broken, he might be able to save some time after all. But even when, as they sometimes did, Negro labourers buried phone lines as they laid them, shell hits would dig them up and break them. And water soaked through insulation, and…

But, to his amazement, after a couple of minutes, the corporal handed him the earpiece and said, "Go ahead."

"Main ammo dump?" he bawled into the mouthpiece; he'd had botched connections before, too, even when everything was supposed to be working perfectly. Sometimes you were better off sending Morse over the line.

But, now, a thin, scratchy voice sounded in the earpiece: "That's right. Who're you and what d'you need?"

"Jake Featherston, First Richmond Howitzers." Jake didn't say he was just a lowly sergeant. If the fellow on the other end of the line wanted to assume he was the battery commander, that was all right with him. It was better than all right, in fact, because he was more likely to be taken seriously that way. "We're giving the damnyankees on the other side of the Susquehanna tarnation, or we would be, 'cept we're mighty low on shells."

"Whole army's mighty low on shells," that disembodied voice answered. "We can maybe get you a few up there, but not a whole lot. Sorry." The soldier back in safe, comfortable Red Lion didn't sound sorry. As best Jake could make out over this infernal apparatus, he sounded bored. Saying no was a lot easier over a wire than face to face.

"The Yankees get time to consolidate, they're gonna hit us back hard," Featherston said. These past few weeks, every mile forward had been gained only by wading through blood. The Confederates stood on the Susquehanna. Featherston wondered if they'd ever stand on the Delaware.

The telephone reproduced a sigh. "Featherstitch or whatever your name is, I can't give you what I ain't got. Some of the shells we were supposed to be gettin', they went to Kentucky instead, for the big push there."

"We don't got enough to do two things both at once?" Jake demanded. "Jesus Christ, is this an army or a man who's too stupid to fart while he walks?"

That got him a chuckle as tinny as the sigh had been. "Makes you feel any better, First Richmond, the Yanks are as bad off as we 'uns. You can shoot off shells faster'n you can make 'em, and that's a fact."

"Yeah, but if the Yanks are short in Kentucky and full-up here 'stead o' the other way round, that doesn't do us a hell of a lot of good," Featherston said.

"Send you all I can, promise," the fellow back at the dump said.

"You better, you expect us to keep fightin' the war," Featherston told him. He hung the earpiece back on its hook with a crash, muttering, "Son of a bitch acts like they're his goddamn shells." The corporal in charge of the telephone, who'd undoubtedly heard language a lot worse than that, snickered. Still fuming, Jake headed off toward the guns.

If the dump didn't send enough shells forward, as seemed highly likely, Captain Stuart would have to do the calling next time. What was the point of carrying a famous name if you couldn't exploit it every now and then?

When Featherston got back to his battery, he discovered his men gathered around a major he'd never seen before: a major of infantry, for the single stars showing his rank were mounted on blue-faced collar tabs. "What's up?" Jake asked, which really meant, What the devil is the infantry doing sniffing around an artillery unit?

The major turned to him. The fellow wasn't very big and his face wasn't very tough, but Featherston' wouldn't have wanted any damnyankee with those hard, gray eyes staring at him over the sights of a Springfield. Almost without realizing he'd done it, he stiffened to attention and saluted.

Crisply, the major returned the salute. "Clarence Potter, Army of Northern Virginia Intelligence," he said. His voice was harsh and clipped and had a trace of a Yankee accent; Featherston wondered if he'd gone to college in the United States. Potter went on, "I am here to investigate a conspiracy threatening the security not only of this army but of the Confederate States of America."

"Jesus Christ!" Jake exclaimed, and then said, "Excuse me, sir, but I don't know anything about anything like that, and I'd be right surprised-I'd be more than right surprised-if anybody here does."

"That's what we were tellin' him, Sarge," Jethro Bixler said. The loader went on, "All we want to do- all any of us want to do- is tie a can to the damnyankees' tails and then get back to what we was doin' 'fore the damn war started."

"Sergeant, if your men are as good with their gunnery as they are at flapping their gums, the Confederate States are in good hands," Major Potter said. "If you'll listen, I'll tell you exactly why I'm here. What I want to know is, how far do you trust the niggers in this battery?"

"The niggers?" Featherston scratched his head. "Haven't hardly thought about the niggers. They do what we tell 'em, and that's that. You want to know the truth of it, most of the time I worry about the horses more. Something's wrong with a nigger, he can tell you what it is and where it hurts. With horses, you got to guess."

"That's how it is, all right," Bixler said, and the rest of the gun crew nodded agreement. Featherston relaxed. His best guess was that the intelligence unit had too much time on its hands and was running around making work for itself so it would look busy and important.

But Clarence Potter shook his head, as if reading Jake's mind. "That's what they want you to think," he said in a low voice. If he'd had long mustaches and twirled them, he would have looked as well as sounded like a stage villain. He went on, "We've broken up four cells of Red rebellion in the niggers of this army in the past two weeks. One of them was in another artillery battery. I won't name names, but we found out the niggers there were sabotaging shells so they wouldn't go off when they came down on the Yankees' heads."

"I be go to hell," Jake said softly. The rest of his men gaped at the major from Intelligence.

"It is a fact," Potter declared. "We shot four buck niggers yesterday- gave them blindfolds and cigars and tied them to posts and shot them dead. One thing this war has brought out is how deeply the rot has spread through the Confederate States. Half the niggers in government service and half the niggers back home, it seems, have been plotting against the white race and the Confederate government, and likely plotting against them for years. We will crush those plots if it means giving half our niggers blindfolds and cigars-if that is what we require, gentlemen, that is what we shall do, for the sake of our race and for the sake of our country."

"I have trouble imagining anything like that in this battery, sir," Featherston said. By the look in his eye, Major Clarence Potter had no trouble imagining almost any sort of trouble anywhere. Featherston continued, "Haven't had reports from the aeroplane pilots or the ground spotters that we're shootin' too many duds, anything like that. And besides"-he laughed ruefully-"it ain't like we got that many shells any which way, live or dud." He explained where he'd been, and why.

"We're investigating that particular scandal, too," Potter said in a tone of voice that did not bode well for whoever he and his cohorts decided was to blame. Featherston didn't know whether it was a scandal or not. The fellow back at the ammunition dump had a point, though Jake wouldn't have admitted it to him, not in a million years; you could shoot off shells a hell of a lot easier than you could make them.

"Red revolutionaries- in the Army?" Jethro Bixler sounded incredulous. "Those are the crazy people who throw bombs at senators, things like that."

"Not all of them are crazy, not even close," Potter said. "Life would be simpler if they were. A lot of them are as hard to spot as a rattler in dry leaves, and every bit as deadly. So, gentlemen- have you seen any Negroes acting in any way suspicious, any way at all?"

Jake glanced over toward the labourers and teamsters who were standing around watching the artillerymen chew the fat with this stranger. You couldn't tell anything from their faces, but then you never could. Jake's father had taught him that almost before he was out of short pants: overseers' lore, even though there weren't any overseers left, not in the old sense of the word, since manumission went through. He wouldn't have given long odds against the Negroes' knowing who Potter was: jungle telegraph, white men called it. He wondered what the blacks thought.

"Well?" the major snapped.

For close to half a minute, nobody said anything. Featherston understood that: even if the labourers and teamsters were imperfectly loyal, how was the battery supposed to function without them? If Major Potter arrested them, who, if anybody, would replace them? The saying about the devil you knew and the devil you didn't held true here.

Or it mostly held true. Jake said, "Captain Stuart's nigger, Pompey, he's… not uppity, but he thinks a good deal of himself, if you know what I mean."

"I do indeed know exactly what you mean, Sergeant," Potter said, his voice grim and predatory. Jake would not have liked to get in his way. But then even the iron-eyed intelligence officer hesitated. "Captain Stuart, you say? That would be Captain Jeb Stuart III, wouldn't it?"

"Yes, sir, sure would," Featherston agreed.

"Damnation," Major Potter muttered under his breath. "Well, we'll see what we can do about finding out what this buck Pompey knows, if he knows anything." He walked off, looking unhappy.

Jethro Bixler laughed softly. "Every time there's an election, everybody starts brayin' about how one white man, he's just as good as the next. Sounds mighty fine, don't it? Look what it's worth when you bump up against one of the big ones, though."

The crew of Featherston's gun nodded, all together. But then an ammunition wagon came doggedly forward over the muddy road. "This here First Richmond Howitzers?" called the driver, a white man. When the gun crew nodded again, the fellow said, "Why the devil didn't you say this here was Jeb Stuart's battery? Jeb Stuart III needs ammunition, by Jesus he gets it."

Featherston started to laugh. The rest of the gun crew joined in, uproariously. The driver first gaped and then started to get mad. For some reason, that only made Jake laugh harder. Every coin had two sides. If Pompey was plotting revolution, he'd be hard to get rid of, because Captain Stuart liked him and trusted him. But if the battery needed shells, shells the battery would have, because Captain Stuart commanded it.

"With a little luck," Jake said, "the good outweighs the bad."

Winter blew through Manitoba so that, when spring finally came, you wondered to find anything standing. Arthur McGregor thanked God that the Americans didn't come out to any of the farms very often. They were, from everything he'd seen and heard, holed up in towns and along railroad tracks. Not many of them had been ready for a winter like this one. He hoped they were a lot colder and more uncomfortable than he was.

"Serves 'em right," he said over supper one long early February night: salt pork from pigs he'd raised himself and bread baked from his own wheat. "They wanted to come up here and take away what's ours, did they? I wish they'd take our winter and ship it back to the USA with 'em, to some place that could use a hard one: Maryland, maybe, or- what was the name of that state of theirs?" Geography had never been his favourite subject in school, and he hadn't cracked a school book in more than half a lifetime.

His son Alexander was no great scholar, either, but his memory was fresher than Arthur's. " California?" he suggested.

"That's the one I meant," Arthur McGregor agreed.

"They say there are parts of that state where it doesn't snow for years and years at a time," Alexander said. "I can't hardly believe that."

"Well, Alexander, when did they tell you that you knew everything there was to know?" his mother asked, with just enough chuckle in her voice to take away the sting, the way medicine was sweetened to fight its bitter taste.

"Now, Maude," Arthur McGregor said, "I have trouble believing that, too." He'd lived in Manitoba since he was about ten years old, and in Ontario before that. Neither province went without snow for years at a time. From October through April, you counted yourself lucky if you went without snow for a week.

But, from the way the U.S. soldiers had trouble with the cold here, he thought it likely they were used to a much milder climate. If you started thinking the whole world was like the part of it where you lived, you were going to be wrong a lot of the time.

Maude got up and carried dishes to the kitchen. She was coming back for a second load when somebody knocked on the door. Maude froze; Arthur admired her for not dropping any of the dishes. Ice that had nothing to do with the weather ran up his back. The best he could hope for was that it was a neighbor in some kind of trouble. The worst… Sometimes, when the Americans ran short of supplies, they made up the lack by plundering the people whose land they'd invaded.

Alexander McGregor pointed to the cabinet where they'd hidden the rifle. Arthur McGregor shook his head. One gun against however many U.S. soldiers might have been out there wasn't betting odds.

The knock came again, louder, more insistent. Now Arthur thought about getting the gun. None of his neighbors would have knocked like that, which left American troops as the next best bet. But one against however many still looked grim. Slowly, he walked to the door. "Who's there?" he called without putting his hand on the latch.

Two words came through the timbers: "A friend."

McGregor scratched his head. Any neighbor would have said who he was, and probably would have been angry at him for not opening up right away, too. And the Americans would also have said who they were, loudly and rudely. Whom did that leave? Nobody likely to come to his door he could think of. "What kind of friend?" he demanded.

The answer came back at once: "A cold one, dammit."

He scowled, but threw the door wide. When he saw the uniformed rifleman outside in the snow, he thought the fellow was an American. Then he realized the greatcoat wasn't green-gray, but the khaki he'd once worn himself. Along with the greatcoat, the Canadian soldier wore a fur cap on his head and long, narrow boards on his feet. McGregor had snowshoes in his own closet, of course, but he wasn't good on skis. "Come in," he said now. "You're a friend indeed, and among friends."

The soldier bent down and undid the straps holding the skis to his feet. He set down the poles that had helped him travel over the snow and hurried into the house so McGregor could close the door behind him. "Thanks," he said with a theatrical shiver. "Have you got any tea or coffee? I've been going for a long time."

"Maude!" McGregor called. His wife hurried into the kitchen again. Her face bore an expression half proud, half worried. The American authorities had issued regulations against harbouring Canadian or British (all of whom they described as "enemy") soldiers, with draconian punishments for disobedience spelled out in minute, loving detail. The Americans seemed very good at spelling things out in minute detail, without much caring what they were defining.

Alexander McGregor, on the other hand, looked as if he was going to bow down before the scruffy Canadian soldier the way the Israelites bowed down to the Golden Calf. Arthur's son was at the age where he was prone to hero worship, and anyone who could hit back at the United Sates was a hero in his eyes now.

A couple of minutes after the kettle started whistling, Maude came out with a steaming cup of tea. "Obliged, ma'am," the soldier said, and sipped. His eyebrows went up. "You even sugared it for me. I'm in your debt."

Maude glanced toward Arthur. Almost imperceptibly, he nodded back. He would have expected nothing less from her than giving a guest the best they had. Yes, sugar was in short supply in these days of occupation, but they wouldn't waste away and die for want of a couple of teaspoonsful.

The soldier drank the cup down while it was still steaming, the better to get all the warmth he could inside him. When it was empty, he sighed deeply. "God bless you," he said. "I may live. I may even want to. Long, cold trip down here, I tell you that." He blinked; his eyes were a startling blue. "Haven't given you my name, have I? I'm Sergeant Malcolm Lockerby, 90th Rifles."

"The Little Black Devils," Alexander breathed. His father nodded, too. The 90th Battalion had always had a good reputation and a fierce name. Alexander went on, "What are you down here for, sir?"

Arthur McGregor knew better than to call a sergeant sir, but didn't correct his son. Malcolm Lockerby grinned a lopsided grin. "For all the mischief I can bring our American cousins," he answered, shrugging out of his heavy pack and setting it and his rifle on the floor. He said nothing more than that, which made Arthur nod again, this time in somber approval. What you didn't know, American questioners couldn't sweat out of you if something went wrong.

"Can I help, sir?" Alexander exclaimed. Sure enough, if he thought he saw a way to give a yank to the Yank eagle's tail feathers, he'd grab it.

Much to Arthur's relief, Lockerby shook his head. "This operation was set up with one man in mind, and more would only complicate things," he said, letting Alexander down easy.

Maude disappeared into the kitchen yet again and came back with a plate of salt pork and bread and butter. She set it on the table, then said, "Eat," like a field marshal ordering an army corps to go over to the attack.

Lockerby obeyed the command with as much elan as any field marshal could have wanted. McGregor's wife refilled his teacup, and then filled it again. She brought a second helping of pork and more bread. Only when the sergeant leaned back in his chair with a sigh of contentment did she desist.

"Now I don't want to leave," Lockerby remarked, which brought a proud smile to Maude's face. The soldier went on, "But I have to, I know. Now- am I right in thinking the railroad is east of here?"

"No, it's to the west," McGregor said, pointing.

"I'll be-" Lockerby didn't say what he'd be, probably in deference to Maude's presence. He shook his head. "I must have skied right over the tracks without even knowing I'd done it. A lot of snow on the ground right now."

"So there is," McGregor agreed. "Tell us the news, or more of it than we get from the lying papers the Americans make people print. Is Winnipeg still holding out?"

"That it is," Lockerby said, "and likely to keep doing it, too, with the lines we've made south of the city. Nobody's moved much since the snows started, but we've done a lot of digging." His face clouded. "We haven't the men to dig like that along the whole length of railroad, though. When spring comes, we're liable to have the country cut in half."

"Aren't they building a new line north of the one that runs through Winnipeg?" Alexander asked. "Then we could keep shipping things east and west, even if-" He didn't go on. When you were still a youth, looking defeat in the face came hard.

"They're building it," Lockerby agreed. "They can't run it too far north, though, because of the lakes, and even if they did, the Americans might keep on pushing. We'll have to see. Have to see if England can spare us any more troops, too." He looked bleak and tired and older than his years.

After sitting for a few more minutes, he got up, donned pack and rifle once more, and went outside to put on his skis. As far as McGregor was concerned, they were outlandish contraptions, but when Lockerby went on his way, he glided across the surface of the snow amazingly fast, amazingly smooth. The farmer stared after him till he vanished into the night.

McGregor also watched the endless wind blowing away his trail. He looked north. Already, you could not tell Lockerby had come to the farm. That suited McGregor fine-better than fine. If mischief befell the Americans, he didn't want it traced back to him unless he'd had a part in it: no, not even then, he decided. Especially not then.

Lockerby's sudden appearance gave the family something to talk about till they went to bed. When Arthur McGregor got up the next morning, he hurried out to use the outhouse and feed the livestock he had left. The day was bright and clear. He peered west, toward the railroad tracks. He could see a train, and it wasn't moving. Wagons and men were gathered around it; he could make out no more because of the distance.

Whenever he went out for chores, he looked toward the stalledsabotaged? bombed? — train. Toward evening, it got moving again. It went up the track for about half a mile. Then, all at once, it stopped. The engine and several of the cars left the tracks, or so McGregor thought, anyhow: with the sun in his face, it was hard to be sure.

Some seconds after he saw the train stop, a harsh, flat bang! reached his ears-without a doubt, the sound of an explosive going off. He wondered if another of those had come in the night to stop the train the first time. If one had, he'd slept right through it.

"That Lockerby, he did good work there," McGregor said to no one in particular, breathe puffing out of his mouth in a frosty cloud as he spoke. He wondered how many other explosives the sergeant had planted along the track. The Americans would have to be wondering the same thing. How long would the line be out of service while they checked it? How many of them would get frostbite or pneumonia checking it?

Normally dour, he smiled from ear to ear as he went back inside.

Captain Wilcox stabbed a finger out at Reginald Bartlett. "How'd you like to lay some barbed wire tonight?" he said.

"Sir, if it's all the same to you, I'd rather lay one of those pretty little Red Cross nurses back at the aid station," Bartlett answered, deadpan.

The Confederate soldiers who heard him laughed and snorted and cheered. One or two of them sent up Rebel yells to show they agreed with the sentiment expressed. Captain Wilcox grinned. By now, he'd got used to the idea that expecting Bartlett to take anything, war included, seriously was asking too much.

"Only trouble is, Reggie, they wouldn't want to lay you," he said. "Your uniform is filthy, your face is grubby, you've got lice in your hair and nits in every seam of your clothes, and you smell like a polecat would if he didn't take a bath for about a year. Barbed wire, now, barbed wire doesn't care about any of that."

"That's all true, sir," Bartlett agreed, "but barbed wire can't foxtrot, either. Honestly, sir-"

It was a losing fight, and he knew it. It wasn't really even a fight at all, just a way to grumble about orders that was different from the profane complaints most men gave. When evening came, he would crawl out of the trench with a roll of barbed wire on his back, and he knew that, too. So did Captain Wilcox, who waved at him and went along the line to pick some more volunteers.

Down in the trenches, you were fairly safe unless you did something stupid like showing yourself to the damnyankees on the other side of the wire, or unless a shell landed right by you, or unless the U.S. soldiers decided to make another probe toward the Roanoke River and happened to pick your stretch of the line to raid.

Once you came out of the earthworks that protected you, though.. once you came out of them, machine guns weren't nuisances any more. They were menaces only too likely to make your family get a "The government of the Confederate States of America deeply regrets to inform you…" telegram. Rifle bullets ran around loose up there, too.

And you were liable to run into damnyankees out between the lines doing the same sorts of things you were. Sometimes you'd work and they'd work and you'd pretend not to notice one another. And sometimes you'd go after them or they'd go after you with guns and bayonets and the short-handled shovels you used to dig holes in the ground. And then the rifles in both trench lines would open up, and the machine guns would start to hammer, and then oh Lord! how you wished you were back of the lines in bed with a nurse-or even down safe in your trench-instead of where you really were.

Captain Wilcox had called Reggie's face grubby. Before he climbed up out of the trench, he rubbed mud on himself till he looked like the end man in a minstrel show. The blacker you were, the harder it was for the Yankees to spot you.

"We ought to send niggers up to do this for us," he said. "They're already black."

"I hear tell they've tried that in Kentucky," Captain Wilcox said. "Didn't work. The Yankees shot at them like they were us, and they didn't have any guns to shoot back with. The ones who lived, you couldn't make 'em go up again."

"Too bad," Reggie said. "Better them than me. Better them than me for just about any job I don't want to do, matter of fact." But when the captain said go, you went. Bartlett nodded to his companions. "Let's get rolling."

The other half-dozen men nodded. He'd been fighting along the Roanoke longer than any of them, so they took his word as Gospel, even if he had no more rank than they did. He was that mystical, magical thing, a veteran. A lot of the men who'd come to the fight with him were dead now. That he wasn't was partly luck and partly being able to remember what he'd learned in his first few fights well enough not to repeat any of the stupid parts.

"Stay low and go slow," he said now. "The less racket we make spreading the wire, the less chance the damnyankees have of starting to shoot at us."

Some kind and thoughtful soul had made a stairway out of sandbags to help the heavily burdened wire men get out of the trench. Bartlett was grateful and angry at the same time: if he hadn't been able to get up onto the battered ground between the lines, he wouldn't have had to crawl forward toward the wire-and toward the enemy.

It was a dark and cloudy night. For once, Reggie wouldn't have minded rain or even snow: nothing better to keep the U.S. forces from knowing he and his chums were out there. But if a storm hid in those clouds, it refused to come out.

He set down his hands with great care every time he moved forward. Behind him, somebody let out a soft, disgusted oath, probably because he'd crawled over a soft, disgusting corpse or piece of corpse. The line had swung back and forth several times; a lot of the dead from both sides had gone without proper burial. And even those who had been thrown into hasty graves or holes in the ground might well have been disinterred by the endless, senseless plowing of the artillery. The smell was that of a meat market that had been out of ice for a month in the middle of a hot summer.

Up above his head, something went fwoomp! "Freeze!" he hissed frantically as the parachute flare spread harsh white light over the field. If you didn't move, sometimes they wouldn't spot you even when you were out there in plain sight. Some of the men in his company spoke of walking right past deer that had bounded away once they'd gone by.

Bartlett was no deer, but he knew he could be in some hunter's sights right now. His nose itched. His hand itched. His scalp and the hair under his arms always itched. He directed a few unkind thoughts to the cooties he carried around with him. But he didn't scratch. He didn't move. He did his best not to blink.

Some Yankee with a rifle started shooting, somewhere too close for com fort. Bartlett froze even colder. But whatever the U.S. soldier thought he saw, it wasn't the Confederate wiring party. Hissing and sputtering, the parachute flare sank ever so slowly, going from white toward red as it did. At last it died, plunging the debatable ground into darkness once more.

"Come on," Bartlett whispered. "Come on, but come quiet."

Like most things, that was easier said than done. When at last they got to the wire barrier they were to strengthen, the men couldn't just unroll the wire and scoot for home. To make it a proper obstruction, they had to mount it on poles and shove the poles in the ground. In some places, the ground was damp. Things were easy there. In some places, though, the ground was frozen. You had a choice then: either stab the supports into the dirt, knowing they wouldn't stay well, or hammer at them with a shovel or whatever you had, knowing the noise was liable to draw fire. Bartlett opted for quiet. "Hell," he muttered to himself, "it ain't like there's not enough wire out here already."

Somebody, though, somebody had to get intrepid. Tap, tap tap. In the middle of a quiet night, the noise might as well have been a shell going off. Along with everybody else in the wiring party, Bartlett made frantic shushing noises. The damnyankees would start tapping, too, the two-inch tap an experienced machine gunner used on the barrel of his weapon to traverse it through its deadly arc of fire.

And sure enough, the U.S. soldiers did open up, first rifles, then machine guns. When a bullet clipped the barbed wire, it sparked blue. There were a lot of blue sparks, as if lightning bugs had suddenly come to roost between the lines of the two armies.

"Out of here!" Bartlett said urgently. He'd just about finished unreeling his wire; he unhooked the roll from his back and, suddenly lighter, hurried back toward the Confederate front line. Never had a muddy, stinking hole in the ground seemed so welcome, so wonderful.

Bullets zipping all around him, he dove into a shell hole. There was a puddle at the bottom of it. A horrible stink rose when he roiled the water. Something- or more likely someone-had died in this hole, too long ago.

A series of two-inch taps sent the Yankees' stream of machine-gun bullets past him. He thought he could make it to the trench before the stream came back. Leaping up out of the shell hole, he ran for all he was worth. Somebody else, panting like a dog, sprinted stride for stride with him.

Slap! His comrade, whoever he was, went down: even with the machine gun busy elsewhere, plenty of rifle bullets were still in the air. Swearing, Bartlett grabbed the other man, slung him over his back in place of the roll of wire, and stumbled on.

He almost went into the trench headfirst. Soldiers caught him, steadied him. "Who have I got here?" he asked, easing the man on his back to the ground.

Somebody struck a match. "It's Jordan," he said, and then, a moment later, quite unnecessarily, "He's dead."

"Good job you picked him up even so," Captain Wilcox said out of the darkness. "You can't know, not for sure. How did the wiring go?"

Bartlett took a minute or so to stop gasping for breath and to let his heart slow as terror began to recede. "Routine, sir," he answered then. "Just routine."

"Routine," Sam Carsten said. "Just routine."

Hiram Kidde laughed out loud. "Ain't one damn thing about it that's routine," the gunner's mate said. "Wearin' summer whites in February, sweatin' in summer whites in February, bein' in the Sandwich Islands at all…" His grin was broad and delighted. "Still can't believe we caught the limeys with their drawers down."

"Might as well believe it," Carsten answered. "It's true." He waved to show what he meant. The two off-duty sailors strolled along the grounds on the eastern side of the entranceway to Pearl Harbor. When the British ruled the Sandwich Islands, they'd built a parade ground there, so their Marines could get in the drill they needed. The parade ground was somewhat the worse for wear after the American invasion of the islands, but Marines still paraded on it: U.S. Marines in uniforms of forest green, several shades darker than Army men wore.

"Eyes-right!" the Marine drill sergeant shouted, marching along with his men. "Sing out-let me hear it, you birds!"

"One, two, three, four," the men sounded off. "Miss Maggie's why we'll win the war!"

Not even a Marine drill sergeant, as fearsome a creature as any ever born, could make the young men ignore the spectacular woman who came out to the parade grounds several days a week to watch them march-and to be watched. The sergeant, a man of sense, didn't even try. He stared at Maggie Stevenson, too. And so did Sam Carsten and "Cap'n" Kidde.

Maggie Stevenson had been in business for herself when the Union Jack flew over Honolulu, and the recent change of ownership hadn't fazed her a bit. Indeed, because there were more American sailors, soldiers, and Marines here now than there had been Englishmen before, her business was better than ever.

"There's one limey I'd like to catch with her drawers down," Carsten said reverently.

"Limey?" Kidde said. "I hear tell she's from Nebraska."

"'Cap'n,' with Maggie it's not what you hear, it's what you see."

Kidde nodded reverently. There was a lot of Maggie to see. She was within an inch of Carsten's height, and was probably even fairer, but on her it looked good. She shielded her face from the sun with a broad-brimmed straw hat. Like a lot of women in Honolulu, she wore a holoku, a baggy, native-style dress that covered her from neck to ankles. Hers, though, wasn't cotton or linen. It was green silk, somewhere between translucent and transparent. When she stood between men and the sun, as she made a point of doing, you could see there was a hell of a lot of woman under there.

After thorough and judicious study, Hiram Kidde said, "Sam, I don't think she's wearin' drawers." He shook his head. "And you can get right there, too, just for the asking." He sighed. "Amazing."

"Not quite just for the asking," Carsten said. "For the paying. If she's not the richest gal in these islands, it ain't for lack of effort."

"Effort?" Kidde laughed. "There's coal-heavers down in the black gang don't work as hard as she does, I hear tell. You know about the setup dear Maggie's got?"

"Tell me," Carsten said. "Beats hell out of thinking about cleaning out a five-inch gun, that's for damn sure." He winked. "'Course, you only got a five-inch gun, Miss Maggie ain't gonna want anything to do with you."

Kidde had been inhaling to say something, which meant he choked when he started to laugh. Sam Carsten pounded him on the back. "You got to watch that," he wheezed when he could talk again.

"I was watching that," Sam said, watching Maggie Stevenson, who was watching the Marines watch her.

"Shut up," Kidde said. "What the hell was I talkin' about? Oh, yeah- her place. They say she's got this big room with four, maybe five, Pullman-sized compartments in there, nothin' in any of 'em 'cept a red couch and a horny guy on it, and she just goes from couch to couch to couch, long as she can walk."

"No wonder she's rich," Carsten said, with the genuine respect a professional in one field gives a professional in another.

"Yup," Kidde agreed. "And she's got 'em lined up for every damn compartment, too, even if she does charge thirty bucks a throw." His hard, blunt face grew dreamy for a moment. "She must be a piece of ass and a half."

"Yeah, reckon so," Carsten said. "But most of a month's pay- hell, more than a month's pay if you're just an ordinary seaman- for five minutes, ten tops? That's a lot to spend just to get your ashes hauled."

"She's got a lot-" the gunner's mate started.

"Of satisfied customers," Sam said, beating him to the punch line. "Yeah." They both laughed. Carsten scratched the angle of his jaw. "I dunno. You can take yourself to just an ordinary everyday crib and lay one o' them Jap girls or a Filipino for a couple-three bucks. Maggie can't be that much better… can she?" But he was still watching the undisputed queen of Honolulu 's ladies of the evening.

"You can get drunk on that olikau popskull the natives cook up here, too," Hiram Kidde observed. "If gettin' drunk is the only reason you're drinkin', fine. But every now and then, don't you hanker after some real sip-pin' whiskey?"

Carsten scratched his jaw without answering. Whiskers rasped under his fingers. He needed a shave. He had a razor back on the Dakota, but you could give a dime to one of the Chinese barbers in the little shops all around Pearl Harbor, and he'd shave you closer and smoother than you could do it for yourself. He got shaved a lot these days. His meals and his hammock were taken care of, so he didn't have a hell of a lot to spend his money on.

The drill sergeant led the marching Marines back toward the British barracks they were occupying. They were too well disciplined to go with really laggard step, but their footwork showed less mechanical precision than usual. A few sailors weren't enough of an audience for Maggie Stevenson to keep herself on display. She retreated to her carriage. The driver, a little, dark Oriental sweating in top hat and cutaway, flicked the reins. Two perfectly matched black horses bore her away. Carsten and Kidde both watched till the carriage was out of sight.

Sam went and bathed, then headed to one of the barbershops and paid a couple of cents extra for a splash of bay rum. The British had set up an electric trolley between Pearl Harbor and Honolulu, though the motormen who took your nickel were uniformly Japs. Carsten wasn't the only military man who got out at the Kapalama stop, east of downtown. Some of the men in white or green acted as if they knew exactly where they were going. He followed them.

The half-timbered house might have been transplanted from London, though it wouldn't have had palm trees around it there. From what "Cap'n" Kidde had said, Carsten had expected to see a line around the block. He didn't. Then the Oriental driver waved him and the rest of the newcomers around to the back. The line was there. Discreet, he thought.

In the Navy, you got used to lines. What was waiting at the end of this one was better than any of the other things for which he'd lined up. He shot the breeze with some of the other guys there. A couple of them seemed too embarrassed about being where they were to say much. Most, though, like him, took it for granted.

When he got up to the back door, another slanteye in formal wear took his money. The fellow wore a pistol, concealed not quite well enough in a shoulder holster. Carsten didn't blame him, not a bit. If Maggie Stevenson's place didn't keep as much cash around as your average bank, he'd eat his hat.

Still another Oriental, also armed, stood at the doorway to the big room Kidde had talked about. "You go Number Three," he said, pointing. Sure enough, the little compartments had brass numbers on the doors, as if they were hotel rooms. Carsten went into Number 3. Inside were a mirror on one wall, a red couch, a pitcher and basin and a cake of soap on a stool, and some hooks on which to hang his clothes.

Sam used the hooks, then lay back on the couch to wait. The noises coming from one of the other cubicles were highly entertaining. Maggie Stevenson worked her way through the other three-there were four in all, not five-and then opened a door on the far side of his compartment. She came in wearing nothing but a smile and a light sheen of sweat. Carsten stared and stared. "Hell of a woman," he muttered; what you could see through even the most diaphanous holoku barely gave you a clue.

"Hello, sailor," she said, her voice English, sure enough. She lathered up the soap and washed Sam's privates. "All part of the service," she said, smiling. Then she bent down and kissed him there, right on the tip, as if it were the end of his nose. "Now-what would you like?"

"You get on top," he said. "I want to see you, too."

"All right." And she did. Those perfect, pink-tipped breasts hung like ripe fruit, inches from his face. He squeezed them and kissed them and licked them. His hands clenched her meaty backside tight.

He wanted to make it last as long as he could. But he hadn't had any in a while, and Maggie made her money by having lots of customers on any one day, so she tried hard to hurry him along. She knew just what she was doing, too. Try as he would to hold back, he bucked and jerked and came, hard enough to leave him dizzy for a moment.

"Hope I see you again, sailor," Maggie said. She leaned over him for a second, just far enough that her nipples brushed against the hair and skin of his chest. Then she got off him and off the couch and headed for the next little cubicle.

Sam got dressed and left, too. One more Oriental in fancy dress showed him the way out. He was whistling as he walked back to the trolley stop. It had been a hell of a good time. Was it worth thirty bucks, worth coming back again? He didn't think so, not really, but he wasn't sorry he'd done it once.

Three or four guys in uniform were walking up the other side of the street toward Maggie Stevenson's place. One of them, he saw with amusement, was a spruced-up Hiram Kidde. He started to wave, then stopped. Later on, maybe, he'd find out if the "Cap'n" thought he'd got his money's worth.